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Wikia
"Wikia (formerly Wikicities) is a free wiki hosting service. The site is free of charge, deriving its income from advertising and sold content, publishing most user-provided text under copyleft licenses. Wikia hosts several hundred thousand wikis using the open-source wiki software, MediaWiki. Its operator, Wikia, Inc., is a for-profit Delaware company founded in late 2004 by Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley Starling—respectively, Chairman Emeritus and Advisory Board member of the Wikimedia Foundation—and headed by Craig Palmer as CEO. Wikia was launched on October 18, 2004, under the name "Wikicities" (which invited comparisons to GeoCities), but changed its name to "Wikia" on March 27, 2006. In the month before the move, Wikia announced a US$4 million venture capital investment from Bessemer Venture Partners and First Round Capital. Nine months later, Amazon.com invested US$10 million in Series B funding. By 2010, Wikias were able to be created in 188 different languages. In October 2011, Wikia announced that Craig Palmer, the former CEO of Gracenote, would replace Penchina as CEO. On February 8, 2012, co-founder Beesley Starling announced she was leaving Wikia to launch a startup called ChalkDrop.com. At the end of November 2012, it was announced that Wikia had raised another US$10.8 million in Series C funding from Institutional Venture Partners and previous investors Bessemer Ventures Partners and Amazon.com. Another $15 million was raised in August 2014 for Series D funding, with investors Digital Garage, Amazon, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Institutional Venture Partners. The total raised at this point was $39.8 million. On March 4, 2015, Wikia announced its appointment of Walker Jacobs, who was the former Executive Vice-President of Turner Broadcasting System, to the new position of Chief Operating Officer. In December 2015, Wikia launched the Fan Contributor Program. On January 25, 2016, Wikia launched a new entertainment news site named Fandom. On September 26, 2016, Wikia announced that Wikia.com would be renamed Fandom powered by Wikia on October 4, 2016, to better associate themselves with the Fandom website. Wikia, Inc. would remain under its current name. Wikia communities consist of online encyclopedias, each one specialized in a particular subject or theme. Although Wikia allows almost anything to be the main focus of a wiki, the most common interest of Wikia internauts is in popular fiction franchises of books, films, games and other media, due to the considerable limitation of such detailed information by Wikipedia's notability policies. 'The main purpose of articles in a Wikia community is to cover information and discussion on a particular topic in a much greater and more comprehensive detail level than can be found on Wikipedia articles. For example, a minor character in Undertale may have its own article on the Undertale wikia, whereas the character may not be considered notable enough for a Wikipedia page. Also, the writing style is mostly directed to those familiar with specific vocabulary and terminology rather than to the lay and general public of Wikipedia. 'Other examples of content that is generally considered beyond the scope of information of Wikipedia articles includes Wikia information about video games and related video game topics, detailed instructions, gameplay details, plot details, and so forth. Gameplay concepts can also have their own articles. Wikia also allows wikis to have a point of view, rather than the neutral POV that is required by Wikipedia (although NPOV is a local policy on many Wikia communities). 'Wikia requires all user text content to be published under a free license; most use the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, although Memory Alpha and Uncyclopedia use a noncommercial variant and some use the GNU Free Documentation License. Wikia's Terms of Use forbid hate speech, libel, pornography or copyright infringement. Material is allowed, as long as the added material does not duplicate Wikimedia Foundation projects. 'The Wikia file store as of June 2011 includes over 8 million files stored on SSD. 'As of August 2015, Wikia uses a heavily modified version of MediaWiki software, based on the version 1.19 of MediaWiki, which was officially marked as obsolete in May 2015. It has more than 250 extensions installed, most of them created by their staff of developers, to add social features like blogs, chat, badges, forums and multimedia, but also remove features like advanced user options or skins other than their default custom skin and Monobook (available only for personal use), which are often used by advanced users but that new users may find confusing. 'In 2016 Wikia launched Fandom, an online entertainment news magazine. Fandom utilizes volunteer contributors called "Fan Contributors" to write news-style articles working alongside an editorial team employed by Wikia. Compared to the Blog feature of individual wiki communities, Fandom focuses on pop culture and fan topics such as video games, movies, television shows etc and voices fan opinions, interviews with property creators, reviews, how-to guides etc. Fandom also includes videos and specific news coverage sponsored or paid for by a property creator to promote their property. 'Wikia has created several official partnerships to create wikis, vetted by the corporation as being the "official" encyclopedia or wiki of a property. In 2014 Wikia partnered with Roddenberry Enterprises to create the Trek Initiative, a Wikia hosted wiki community site that features video interviews, promotions and other material about Stark Trek to celebrate its 50th anniversary. In 2013 Wikia partned with SOE (now called Daybreak Games) to create official wikis for several of their games such as Free Realms, Planetside 2 and the Everquest franchise. Wikia made similar partnerships with 2K Games during the launch of Civilization: Beyond Earth and Warner Bros Interactive for Shadow of Mordor." '- Wikipedia's description of Wikia.' "Wikia '''is the very website that hosts this wikia." '''- The Wrong Wikia's description of Wikia. Category:Websites Category:Wikipedia Category:Stuff1